Abstract:
I will sketch out the analogy between the Wason Task(s) and the Paradox of Confirmation. This will mainly involve going through some existing historical discussions concerning the analogy, and developing a precise framework for refining and critiquing the analogy. I will explain what I think is right about the existing literature, and also what I think is wrong with it (i.e., what I think the disanalogies are). Along the way, I will make various historical observations about confirmation theory and some of the contemporary evaluative assessments of the behavior of subjects faced with Wason Task(s).
Abstract:
This talk has two goals. The first is to introduce philosophers and cognitive scientists to a “ruthlessly reductive” field in current neuroscience, ‘molecular and cellular cognition (MCC),’ that has been investigating and increasingly discovering the cellular and molecular bases of specific cognitive phenomena. Learning and memory have so far provided the field’s greatest accomplishments, but experimental work is now underway on virtually all phenomena that comprise cognitive science. The key experimental practices that characterize this field are the use of genetically engineered mutant mammals and a variety of behavioral procedures widely accepted as measures of specific cognitive functions. This work contravenes the popular assumption that only “higher level” neuroscience, namely cognitive and systems neuroscience, can fruitfully address “the mind.”
My second goal is to present the experimental conditions that need to be met in order for MCC practitioners to assert that a cellular or molecular mechanism for a specific cognitive function has been established. Neurobiologist Alcino Silva was the first to propose what we now call The Convergent Four hypothesis; recently Silva, Bickle, and Anthony Landreth have revised these four jointly sufficient conditions on experimental evidence. I’ll explain each condition (as we’ve articulated them so far) and give an example of an experimental result from MCC that illustrates each one. There is reason to think that these conditions are employed beyond MCC, throughout causal-mechanistic sciences generally. They suggest a novel account of scientific reductionism (compared to existing accounts articulated by philosophers of science), a automatable program for increasing the efficiency of scientific research, and a codification of scientific practices that could replace widely accepted accounts (like Mill’s methods).
Abstract:
The talk will propose a rationalization of drinking the toxin in the Toxin Puzzle and of taking only one box in Newcomb's problem within the confines of causal decision theory. The essential point will be to explicitly separate decision and action within so-called reflexive decision models - something not considered so far - and then to observe that the conditional probabilities that make no causal sense within the usual unreflexive decision models simply reflect a common cause relation within the reflexive models. The point has deep consequences that will be only hinted at, e.g. on the rationalization of cooperation in the one-shot prisoners' dilemma.
Abstract:
In the late 1960's and early 1970's there was a great deal of
inconclusive discussion of whether it could ever be rational to change
our logic. The arguments that this could be rational were based on
rather dubious examples. In this paper I will try to make a stronger
case that change of logic can be rational, by focusing on the semantic
paradoxes. I may also discuss some issues about the impact of this on
formal epistemology.
Abstract:
Conceptual analysis is difficult; analysis of a normative concept like "rights" generates even greater challenges. The paper surveys the long-standing debate between the two leading accounts of the nature of rights, and argues that the debate is intractable because each side is defending a partial analysis in order to bolster some controversial substantive normative theory. Progress in understanding rights depends on our generating an analysis that captures all of the complexities of rights as they are commonly understood.
Abstract:
Georg Cantor's Foundations of a General Theory of Manifolds (1883) is a watershed in the history of philosophy: It finally and definitively put to rest the historical 'paradoxes' of the actual infinite, at a time when the demands of mathematics itself led to its introduction. But at the same time, with its theory of transfinite numbers, it exposed the real problem of the infite: The essential open-endedness of the mathematical universe and the consequent unceasing demand for new axioms to express it.
Abstract:
The year 2004 marks the fiftieth birthday of the first mathematical theorem to be proved by a computer: “the sum of two even numbers is again an even number” (with Martin Davis’ implementation of Presburger Arithmetic) Classical theorem proving procedures of today are based on ingenious search techniques to find a proof for a given theorem in very large search spaces – often in the range of several billion clauses.
The shift from search based methods to more abstract planning techniques opened up a new paradigm for mathematical reasoning on a computer and several systems of the new kind employ a mix of classical as well as proof planning techniques.
In my talk I shall trace some key ideas of the past and then concentrate on current systems based on proof planning, using OMEGA, a mathematical assistant system developed with the support of the Sonderforschungsbereich 378 (Resource adapted cognitive Processes) as a case study for demonstratingcurrent strengths (and weaknesses) of the field.
Abstract:
Many people are suspicious of equality as a value. They believe that egalitarians are motivated by base emotions like envy, and that they are committed to the Levelling Down Objection, which holds that valuing equality leads to levelling down. Specifically, many anti-egalitarians believe that egalitarians are committed to policies such as putting out the eyes of the sighted in order to promote equality between the sighted and the blind. Accordingly, egalitarianism is claimed to be an absurd view that only a hardened misanthrope could endorse. In this talk, I distinguish between different kinds of equality, and illuminate one particular version of egalitarianism that I call Equality as Comparative Fairness. I defend this version against several rival positions, as well as against numerous objections, including the Levelling Down Objection. In addition, I present several examples illustrating that although equality is not /all/ that matters, we cannot simply dispense with the ideal of equality if we want to do full justice to all our moral beliefs.
Abstract:
In Knowledge and Its Limits (2000), Timothy Williamson presented an argument for the conclusion that mental states, in general, fail to be luminous. Roughly, a mental state M is luminous just in case if one is in M, one is in a position to know that one is in M. I try to show that Williamson’s argument proceeds by unacceptable sorites reasoning, despite Williamson’s explicit claims to the contrary. A key issue in this connection is how reliability conditions for knowledge are to be understood when allowance is made for borderline cases. There is additional discussion of what implications the indiscriminability of distinct mental states may have for the luminosity of the mental.
Abstract:
Models of set theory (or higher-order logic) using Boolean algebras (for classical logic) or Heyting algebras (for intuitionistic logic) are well known and have generalizations in Topos Theory. Such models show that higher-order logic has arguably natural models with properties different from the standard, two-valued semantics. Perhaps not as much attention has been given to analogous models for modal logic. The lecture will review background and suggest some possibilities and questions.
Included in the approach is a very cannonical model for a modal probability logic which may not have been noticed before.
Abstract:
We focus on an unexpectedly close connection between the logic of mathematical concepts and the logic of informal concepts from common sense thinking. This connection is new and there is the promise of establishing similar connections involving a very wide range of informal concepts.
We call this development the Concept Calculus. For the initial result, we focus on two particular informal concepts from common sense thinking. These arethe binary relations BETTER THAN, MUCH BETTER THAN.
We present axioms involving “better than” and “much better than”, and identity between objects. These axioms are of a simple basic character, and range from obvious to plausible.
We have established that these basic axioms form a system which is mutually interpretable with the usual ZFC axioms for mathematics. Thus we have a consistency proof for mathematics using the consistency of these axioms for "better than" and "much better than".
We survey additional results of this kind, some of which are based on informal concepts of a physical nature. In each case, we obtain mutual interpretability with ZFC and beyond.
Abstract:
Agents derive benefit from communicating with each other. In order to communicate they need to have a language in common. Learning languages is costly. In this setting we discuss mechanisms that each satisfy three of the following requirements:
Assignment Efficiency, Strategy-Proofness, Voluntary Participation and Feasibility.
Abstract:
I will examine critically three arguments that have been developed against the massive modularity hypothesis on the basis of neuroscientific findings: Karmiloff-Smith's argument that developmental double dissociations provide no evidence for modularity, Plomin's argument that the mind is influenced by generalist genes and thus that the mind is not the modular, and Steve Quartz's argument that findings about brain allometry show that evolution did not result in a modular mind.
Abstract:
Meta-analysis of measurement results of fundamental physical constants is an established activity in precision measurements. Through this method the standard values of the speed of light, the charge of electron, among others, have been obtained to be widely used in science, technology and industry. I claim that this important scientific activity cannot be explained as rational or even making sense by some versions of anti-realism, including those of van Fraassen, pragmatists and a sort of social constructivists whereas it can be done by a version of scientific realism, activity realism.
According to this realism, in order to explain the scientific activity we should commit ourselves to, for instances, the existence of the speed of light and that of electron when they are posited not by one or another successful theory but by a successful meta-analysis. The meta-analytic activity is claimed to presuppose, rather than a single coherent theory, a patchwork of theories within which one theory or a patch may contradict to another. I will also set up the criterion of existence for activity realism, and explore when electron was known to exist in the light of this criterion.
Abstract:
Harvey Brown believes it is crucially important that the "geodesic principle" in general relativity is a more-or-less immediate consequence of Einstein's equation. He takes this to show that it has a different status within the theory than other basic principles regarding, for example, the behavior of light rays and clocks, and the speed with which energy can propagate. He believes that the geodesic principle is an essential element of general relativity itself, while the latter are better understood as contingent facts about the particular matter fields we happen to encounter.The situation seems much less clear and clean to me. There certainly is a sense in which the geodesic principle can be recovered as a theorem in general relativity. But one needs more than Einstein's equation to drive the theorems in question. Other assumptions are needed -- ones that look a lot like the principles that are supposed to be fundamentally different from the geodesic principle. My principal goal in this talk is to formulate a proposition that make this claim precise.
Abstract:
I will discuss some recent work on the use of scoring rules in arguments for probabilistic coherence. Instead of supposing that these rules reflect penalties that agents suffer for making inaccurate predictions, I will use them to assess epistemologically important features of degrees of belief. I will focus, in particular, on a weakening of the requirement of strict propriety that prohibits scoring rules which allow coherent degrees of belief to be strictly dominated. I will describe a theorem which shows that this condition, together with a few other reasonable requirements (continuity and truth-directedness), suffices to show that incoherent sets of degrees of belief are inadmissible. I will compare this result to some recent work, including papers by Lieb, et. al., and Schervish, Seidenfeld and Kadane.